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Administrations often enter office with or along the way invent “buzz words” meant to represent truly transformational thinking. And almost as often as not, these buzz words sink without trace; lead to poor policy choices and outcomes; or are overtaken by events.
In George W. Bush’s first months, the buzz word was “transformation,” meaning moving the military into the 21st century. But the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq intervened. Transformation sunk without trace. Because the rivalry with China seemed to be growing more adversarial, in 2014 the Obama administration “pivoted” to Asia and the Pacific, frightening friends and allies and alienating the Middle Kingdom.
The Trump administration suffered from an excess of buzz words, “America First” being among the most destructive, culminating in a major withdrawal from international agreements and organizations. In defense, team Trump expanded the Obama “4+1” military strategy by adding “contain” to the “deter and defeat” criteria set by that administration. But neither administration was able to define in specific terms how contain, deter, and defeat were to be achieved except by spending more money.
Now, the Biden Department of Defense has a new potential construct that so far is a buzz word. But could it become a bold, transformative idea that actually drives strategy? That is the challenge facing Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
At the change of command for the Indo-Pacific region in Pearl Harbor last April, Secretary Austin first announced his concept of integrated deterrence (ID) as “the cornerstone of defense to make sure U.S. adversaries know that the risk of aggression is out of line with any conceivable benefit.”
According to the Secretary, integrated deterrence “is the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities—all woven together and networked in a way that is credible, flexible and so formidable that it will give any adversary pause . . . (and) . . . is multidomain, spans numerous geographic areas of responsibility, is united with allies and partners, and is fortified by all instruments of national power.” Further, ID “means working together in ways that were not done before . . . and all of us giving it our all.” And ID will be central to the Biden administration’s national security strategy to be released in early 2022.
Any evaluation of ID must begin with analysis of what “integrated” and “deterrence” mean and then determining what is new or different; how ID translates into policy, strategy, and, as the Secretary says, “the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities.”
Integrated was once called a “comprehensive or whole of government approach.” But how integrated is the Department of Defense internally and with the rest of the U.S. government?
The five-sided Pentagon is a metaphor for how the department is organized with five centers of power: the Secretary of Defense and the OSD Staff; the Joint Chiefs; the Chairman and the Joint Staff; the three service secretaries; and the eleven combatant commanders (for the purposes of this column, the defense agencies are lumped under the Secretary of Defense). Given interservice rivalries that can foster both competition and redundancy and relatively constant budget shares for each, services integration is a work in progress.
The Unified Command Plan for the eleven regional and functional combatant commanders, however, is not aligned with the organization of the Pentagon. In turn, neither is aligned with how the State Department, CIA, and NSC are organized. There is no commonality with how the four key congressional committees that oversee Defense—Armed Services and Appropriations—are organized. And within the White House, who ensures that policy directives issued by the president, in this case for closer integration, are fulfilled by the departments?
About integration with allies and friends, President John F. Kennedy famously mused that “the only thing worse than being an enemy of the United States was being a friend or ally.” NATO members were not pleased by the Biden decision to leave Afghanistan by 31 August and being informed, not consulted. But the Trump administration was equally blameworthy when it negotiated the withdrawal from Afghanistan with the Taliban purposely excluding the Kabul government of Ashraf Ghani from participating in the Doha Accords.
Will integrated defense overcome or change these organizational anomalies in how the Pentagon operates and makes its decisions? Much more discussion and elaboration are needed to answer this question. So far, then, ID is a buzz word.
Deterrence likewise needs reviewing. Is deterrence that of the Cold War? Then, deterrence depended on the threat of retaliation and the buzzword MAD for mutual assured destruction. In the U.S. view, MAD meant that both sides could withstand a first thermonuclear strike and still retain the capacity to destroy the other several times over. Conceptually, some argued MAD created an “extended deterrence” for stopping lesser uses of force.
But MAD did not deter the Cuban Missile Crisis; Soviet interventions into Czechoslovakia and Poland; and active measures to destabilize the West. Nor did it prevent the United States from Vietnam and other military interventions, demolishing the idea of “extended deterrence.” Will these flaws apply to ID?
The Soviets and Russians had far different understandings of deterrence. In Russian, the closest term for deterrence is Sderzhivanie. But Sderzhivanie implies an active defense that the Soviets believed was vital because retaliation alone was insufficient if war extended beyond first and second strikes. Hence, the Soviets and the Russian Federation concluded that planning for that contingency could not be ignored and must be part of strategy. That meant “fighting” a nuclear war had to be considered no matter the costs because once a conflict started, survival was existential—a concept foreign to the United States and the West.
Addressing the question of what China and Russia are being deterred is crucial. Since common sense dictates that neither those two powers nor the United States wants war, where does integrated deterrence fit and where does it not? China has not been discouraged or deterred from much. Deterrence surely has not prevented China from a major military buildup; Belt and Road; intimidating Taiwan; militarizing islets in the China seas; and adopting “wolf warrior” tactics by its diplomats. Russia was not deterred from moving into South Ossetia; eastern Ukraine; annexing Crimea; or conducting “active measures” to disrupt and destabilize the West.
Because the Secretary spoke in aspirational and nonspecific terms, how “we will work together” in ways that are different from the past has yet to be demonstrated. Given the primacy of deterrence in his formulation, does the secretary believe that Cold War and 20th century definitions still apply in the 21st century? Or have the profound changes following the attacks of September 11th magnified by what is commonly perceived in Washington as the growing political, strategical, ideological military and, perhaps most importantly, economic threat from China as well that continuing to emerge from Russia made a significant difference in the meaning of deterrence?
The challenge is self-evident. Unlike failures in the past to do so, Secretary Austin must turn integrated deterrence from a buzz word into a bold concept that drives strategy and “the right mix of technology, operational concepts and capabilities.” The questions are can he and will he?
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